Way way back before I can remember, there was a magazine going by the moniker of 'Your Sinclair'. During the decline of the Spectrum and the rise of the Amiga, Your Sinclair started to melt away into the aether, until, in the early nineties, apart from there being time for Klax, a second magazine was forged from the talent of the Your Sinclair team called 'Amiga Power'. Many years passed and the Amiga lived a happy and prosperous life. An avid fan of Amiga Power, 'C-Monster', wrote many letters into Amiga Power's 'Do The Write Thing' and eventually became a recurring guest writer. All too soon however, it was outclassed by a wave of cheap PC's, prompting Future to disband 'Amiga Power' and to create the magazine we know today as 'PC Gamer'. C-Monster, however was left without a magazine and was left, we assume, to hang around in The End of Time, slowly becoming another entity known as Kieron Gillen, who then joined the PC Gamer team.

Much later, in... gawd knows when, some guy named Chris Delay got together with some friends and formed Introversion Software and wrote a PC game named Uplink, a demo of which somehow ended up on the cover of PC Gamer. A friend of mine and a then avid reader of PC Gamer, Andy, (whom I believe would've bought the magazine if it weren't for Kieron) picked up a full copy of Uplink and showed it to me. Intrigued, I dropped into the #Uplink IRC channel on OpenProjects, a channel maintained by two guys: WolfLord and Icepick. As the Uplink community matured, more and more of the Uplink community was maintained by Wolf and Ice, and mounting pressure from the OpenProjects operators prompted them to host their own IRC server. I believe it was this, together with some other bizarre coincidence, that led them to create their own online comic, 'Best Comic Ever'. As Best Comic Ever grew, another friend of mine, Tom, became interested in it. He created his own fancomic based on Best Comic Ever, named 'Best Comic Never'. Over time, Best Comic Never began to feature Wolf and Ice less and less, instead focusing on humour based around himself and I. Tom, since... I dunno, had the idea that he would like to begin a collaborative website with myself and another friend Edd. Constructed from our respective internet nicknames at the time, 'Mr. Dictionary', 'Machina Regime' and 'Carpets', the new site was named 'MoDCAMeRa'. Over time, no MoDCAMeRa site was formed and the idea almost forgotten until, in the early summer of 2004, Tom begin planning pages of a comic of the same name, based around the humour of Best Comic Never.

Just to see what would happen, and more importantly to stop Tom trying to online MoDCAMeRa under his original website design, I agreed to draft some inital designs for a MoDCAMeRa website. A quick design later, I placed them online under a subdomain at my then Web-Mania based mrdictionary.net website. More twiddling resulted in a cleverly crafted mySQL based dynamic content delivery system presenting news posts, comics and the ability to add comments to the comics. Later, Tom bought the domain 'modcamera.com' and hosting was moved to a then-free EcwHost.com. Later, I programmed a powerful PHP administration application named MoDCAMeRa Manager, which, for the last year, has provided me and Tom with an easy means to maintain the content of the MoDCAMeRa site.

modcamera.com is a collection of PHP files which define what content is loaded into the centre cell of a screen-filling table controlling the layout of the page. The contents of left hand menu pane, the centre cell and the invisible right hand cell are easily defined using a system of functions. Two main PHP files contain the code on which the dynamic content of the site is loaded. One page contains functions which allow the HTML pieces of the site to be called, such as table layout fragments, or repeating elements like the news boxes. The other file contains functions which query the modcamera.com database, returning news post data, comic data, comic comment data, or mixtures and arrays of all three.

Site administration is done through the MoDCAMeRa Manager, apart from ModBox alterations which must be done manually.

Users visitng modcamera.com are greeted with the most recent 'news thread', a string of mostly legible news post banter between whoever can remember their MoDCAMeRa Manager password. Users can either view the latest comic, see a list of all comics, browse through old news threads, or peruse a rarely-updated list of projects that we've been working on in the 'ModBox'. The comic is updated twice-weekly by comic 'artist' Tom. Occasionally, news posts and comic comments may be written by Edd, Alex or Andy.

The continued existence of modcamera.com continues to confuse me in a truly profound manner, I must admit. Something I went along with as a curosity and a bit of coding practice has endured to this day... be it through Tom's tenacity, or that Nick, our hosting benefactor, has just forgotten to delete it. Who knows, eh?

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Okay, the above was written sometime in August 2005... since then, MoDCAMeRa's been through a lot.

Tom gave Edd the root password for the site circa October 2005. About a month later, he deleted every file on the hosting server. Y'know, just for kicks. We managed to restore the majority of the comics, but there were several gaps in the list that were never filled. In March 2006, Tom simply got bored making comics and just stopped. That's about it really...

The domain name is still in my possession, I think... does anybody want it? Bids start at $1,000. :P